HAL's Legacy:
2001's Computer as Dream and Reality

David G. Stork (editor)

You have to keep your tongue in cheek to write about the physics
of Star Trek. In contrast, 2001 (and the novel 2001: A Space
Odyssey, in which Hal is "born" in 1997) is not at all embarrassing
as a starting point for a book about artificial intelligence.
Clarke and Kubrick treated science with respect and made a serious
effort to predict the future. Their failures when it comes to HAL
and artificial intelligence reflect the predictive failures of the
discipline more than their own errors.

In HAL's Legacy Stork has assembled an impressive list of contributors:
Daniel Dennett on the moral and ethical status of artificial
intelligences, Douglas Lenat on common sense, Raymond Kurzweil on
speech recognition, and Murray Campbell on computer chess, to name
just a few. Other chapters cover Moore's law and hardware improvement,
fault tolerance, speech synthesis, language use, speechreading, vision,
affective computing, and planning. Interviews with Marvin Minsky and
Stephen Wolfram are broader, though many of the other contributors wander
away from their topics to address philosophical issues. There are some
fairly serious disagreements between the contributors, especially about
the longer term prognosis for the discipline, but these don't dominate
to the point where they leave the reader feeling baffled.

The contributors look both backwards — at the successes and failures
of 2001 as a prediction of the future — and forwards — at what we
are likely to have achieved by 2001 itself and at what the more distant
future holds. But mostly they concentrate on the present — what has
already been achieved and what is possible without revolutionary advances
on current technology. The overall balance between speculation and hard
fact works rather well.

The connections to HAL and 2001 are substantial and not just a source
of throwaway glamour: many of the contributors clearly found the film
personally inspiring. With a forward by Arthur C. Clarke himself and
a good selection of full colour stills, Hal's Legacy will be a great
pleasure for fans of 2001. But, whether you have seen the film or not,
I recommend HAL's Legacy as a readable introduction to the realities
of artificial intelligence.